The alternative is to simply look at longer time horizons.
In the 1990 you could have beaten the market by simply realizing that the PC was going to explode into an everyday item and simply focused on buying and holding the sector vs any one stock. That's not going to see huge daily gains, but on the backs of huge successes like Dell it could easily have turned ~100k into retirement money in a decade.
That worked better when companies IPO'ed earlier. Now most of those gains get taken by private capital. If the equivalent of the PC now is AR/VR/XR or say synthetic biology I can't invest in that without connections and already having that retirement money.
(1) the US will move to single payer health care. Besides the growing popular support for this, there is a coming crisis of corporate, municipal, and state pension funds which are unfunded to pay for their growing health care commitments. Single payer will be used to bail out those pension liabilities.
(2) Climate change. Consider effects on real estate of the placement of storm barriers, the increases of flood tides, etc.
(3) Self-driving cars. Lots of unexplored knock-on implications of the cultural changes. Dropoff without parking may reinvigorate walkable downtowns. Driving without attention required will enable longer commutes and combined work+commute with mobile offices. Cheaper last-mile delivery may push more retail shopping online. Introduction of drive-thru services targetting unoccupied vehicles -- dispatch a car to fetch something. The now high-end service of going shopping and asking for items to be sent back to your home could become commonplace.
(4) demographics. You can predict China's growth will soon slow looking at how the age distribution is projected to change.
I don't see anything right now growing the way the PC revolution did. But, thinking in terms of what stocks you would want to own 10 years from now is IMO still valuable.
Oil companies are still going to be making tons of money in 10 years, but people will start to doubt their future without heavy diversification. Whichever company wins to battle for solar cell manufacturing is going to become the next Exxon, but it's going to be a long brutal slog. Still if your in your 20's buying and holding any company that looks to have an advantage in this space is a long term winning strategy even if most of them will fail.
In the 1990 you could have beaten the market by simply realizing that the PC was going to explode into an everyday item and simply focused on buying and holding the sector vs any one stock. That's not going to see huge daily gains, but on the backs of huge successes like Dell it could easily have turned ~100k into retirement money in a decade.